Why are skills auto-learn? Why make the game "less"? Can I not play the game properly?

[adricom]

I am so excited that I can play my favorite game and it's incredible that you guys keep it alive. But why make this type of fastfood changes that led half of Blizzard's population back to their 20 year old version of their game?

I just made a character, I receive a quest to learn my skills and visit my trainer, and somehow I already have the skills and my trainer is useless and just like that I am snapped out of the story and the immersion.
1)What does this change serve?
2)Why are changes that make you play the game LESS any good?
3) If people like this "fast" style for the game, can we at least get an option for it because some of us actually do enjoy playing the game fully?

All thoughts welcome, excuse my disappointment and tone.

TLDR: Why are skills auto-learn? I want to play the game properly. I am not against custom changes but not when they make the game "less". If many people like this can we at least get an option to play it normally while without auto learn etc so it's a win win? This alienates!

[leftayparxoun]

Back on Live, career skills were indeed not automatically acquired, however they also came with certain costs in order to acquire them.

I cannot speak for the ROR devs in this case but I believe the reasons on why skills became auto-acquired is so that the new player experience can be improved. Here's my reasoning:

Even a fully experienced player who starts cultivating as soon as they create a character cannot start passively making profit until 8 hours of gameplay or more later (200 culti + a full stack of materials to sell). Unless you have gold to send over from other characters, you are going to either queue scenarios during the entire mid-tier (80 silver per win) or you will have to cut cornets. And by cutting corners I mean stuff like not buying a lvl 16 mount at level 16, not cleansing your Wounds debuff after a death, not having armor + stat pots for your level, not buying the city vendor green gear appropriate for your level, not buying the lvl 38 mount in time, not buying more Vault 2 rows in your capital Bank(s), etc. It is especially horrendous for new players who also don't know better and have to buy their talismans from Auction House for exorbitant prices.

Scenarios, while profitable, are in a quite bad state nowdays and they can be very hit or miss (even in mid tier). Even when they are popping a lot with favorable outcomes for you, it is still quite a bad way to level your characters if you want to hit level 40 with a decent RR. By just spamming scenarios (no rvr) I estimate most people would end up with rr38 to rr45.
Another option is to take the gold pouches from rvr weekly but that of course comes at the cost of losing out on crests from the same reward tier. Finally, new characters can also rely on non-passive methods of acquiring gold, such as doing Quests or PQs. However, besides this method being inefficient, it is also very dependent on your knowledge (of what Quests to do, which PQs to farm) that can make the economy of the game feel like a huge slog for a new player who doesn't know better.

Having established all that, I think that the feature of "buying career skills" and probably also "spending gold to respec masteries" were removed as a way to help the new player economy. There is an arguement to be made about just making the cost of those skills to 0 but keeping the old method of buying them from the Career NPCs, however what merrit would that have?

Pros:

• Preserving the Live vision of the game

• Slightly enhancing the feeling of player progression

Cons:

• Having to go back to the warcamp every time you gain a level (this would be quite tedious in Tier 1, especially if for whatever reason you are doing PvE at a faraway place)

• Having to go back to the warcamp after gaining a level only to figure out that you gain nothing in this level and have to walk back to where you were before while cursing whoever Mythic dev designed class progression back in 2007. Yes, anywheretrainer addon is a thing (to check if you need to go back), but how many people, let alone new players, know about it and use it?

• Less likely, but still possible to miss or forget for a new player; not everyone is as attentive to one-off quests/instructions and they need the message hammered to them (sidenote: go to the ROR discord and ask long time members how many times they've had to explain/seen someone explain to a new player that you actually need to put a Mastery point in a skill to get the ability).
  And of course one might say "But this is not my problem! I read quests and I follow instructions. I don't care if those new players/zoomers can't do the same". But even from this (selfish) outlook, there are still problems.
  1. You will be matched/have to play with those new players as teammates in early tiers. Do you want to have a healer in your party without AOE heals? Or a a Tank in your dungeon without Challenge? I sure don't want to, nor to have to figure out that's the case and explain to them where to go pick up 38 levels worth of skills.
  2. Those players might get bored and quit the game before getting the reminder/explanation of where to buy their skills again.

All in all, the old system seems to me like it did more harm than it helped.
Sure, preserving the identity of WAR is important to a certain extent, but ROR is not WAR and the devs seem to think so it.
Sometimes it's just better to move on with the times.